Overlay or code repair? You decide.

There are roughly two ways to make your site accessible. They sound the same but work fundamentally differently, and that difference decides whether you're actually helped or just buying peace of mind. Here's the explanation; the choice is yours.

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The overlay (widget)

A piece of JavaScript you paste onto your site. It places a layer over your page and adjusts what the visitor sees in their browser, buttons, contrast, read-aloud options. Your own source code stays untouched. Quick to install, but the underlying errors remain: the layer hides them, it doesn't repair them.

Repair at the source

Here the error is pinpointed in your own code, the missing alt text, the unnamed form field, the insufficient contrast, so it truly disappears. More work, but it's a lasting repair that reaches every visitor and every assistive tool, and that holds up under an audit. This is what Seviranta does.

Why it matters legally

An overlay often promises "100% compliant" or a percentage resolved automatically. Independent experts broadly agree this isn't possible: the Overlay Fact Sheet, signed by over 800 accessibility professionals, including the makers of the open-source engine axe-core, states that no overlay product can make a site fully compliant with any standard, and therefore cannot remove the legal risk.

In April 2025 the US regulator FTC fined an overlay vendor $1 million, precisely for claiming its automated tool could make a site WCAG-compliant. It's exactly that kind of promise regulators target, not accessibility itself, but the false certainty around it.

Tellingly: according to a major overlay vendor's own enforcement report, 38.5% of companies sued in 2025 already had an accessibility tool running. Installing a tool is therefore not the same as being accessible.

Our conviction: repairing the source is the lasting solution

An overlay sits on top of your site: it adjusts what the visitor sees in their browser at that moment, but the error stays in your code. Change your theme, add a plugin or let the script fail to load, and the barrier is back. Repairing the source removes the error itself: fixed stays fixed, it reaches every visitor and every assistive tool, and it holds up when an auditor or regulator looks under the hood. That's why Seviranta repairs in the source code and keeps monitoring, so your site doesn't just look fine for a moment, it stays fine, with a dossier that proves it. No tool, ours included, makes a site automatically ‘100% compliant’; that's why we spell out what a machine can and can't do. But what we repair is repaired for real.

Curious what's wrong in your code?

The free scan pinpoints the real errors in your own source code, with the exact line. No layer, no account, we store nothing.

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Sources

We deliberately link to independent sources, not to ourselves, so you can verify what we say.